AI Challenges Human Writers in CAH’s Latest Black Friday Stunt

Cards Against Humanity – termed a party
game for horrible people – has always been a fan of wacky Black Friday stunts
that protest several issues the company sees as problematic. In the latest
iteration of their Black Friday shenanigans, the company has pitted human
writers against an AI-trained system to make expansion cards for the game. At
the end of the period, if the AI had more sales, the company claimed it’ll fire
their writers. If the writers had more sales, they would earn a
five-thousand-dollar bonus. The commentary on how AI may replace human workers
isn’t lost on the myriads of onlookers watching the stunt.

An AI Trained to be Horrible?

Cards Against Humanity is a game where players
try to match answers with questions. The answers are usually some combination
of humorous, tactless, morbid, or tasteless. To produce cards that fit what the
company wants from its system, they pressed an open-source GPT2 system
developed by OpenAI into service. The system’s training started by reading
internet comments to create a sense of punctuation. It then read through all of
the cards that already exist, including those that were never released
publicly. Once the system was able to produce grammatically correct cards
consistently, the creators stopped training.

Stiff Competition

The company live-streamed the event through
the entirety of Black Friday, with the humans winning the competition by an
extremely narrow margin. Cards Against Humanity’s site states that the humans
won the day by about $1725 ahead of the AI competition. The gag is precisely
what regular buyers and consumers of the company’s games would expect from
them, but the competition raises some real-world, not-so-funny issues. With AI
progressing at such a rate, it’s only a matter of time before they start
replacing people in their jobs. For now, most people consider those creative
roles, such as writing and art, may still be beyond the ability of AI to
comprehend and mimic. The competition’s results show that humans may be wrong
about their complete dominance in these fields.